Plasma “bullet” with hollow structure: formation and evolution

Since the plasma “bullet” and ring shape were discovered by Teschke and coworkers in 2005, the hollow structure of the plasma “bullet” has been a hot topic as an important phenomenon. Clearing the mechanism back on the phenomenon is very important to research and application of atmospheric pressure plasma jet (APPJ). Although a lot of discussions on the generation and evolution of the hollow structure have been conducted in past years, there is a substantial divergence between the experimental researcher and the numerical simulation researcher. The former considers that the Penning effect has a main contribution, because the presence of impurities enables the Penning process to occur at the gas flow/air interface. On the contrary, numerical simulation claims that the Penning effect is not so decisive to the formation of hollow structure. Based on our previous work, this paper aims to clear the debatable topic by setting the special experiments. After comparing and analyzing the phenomena and mechanism, a better comprehension is reached on the contribution of the Penning effect to the hollow structure. We also give a promising conclusion for forming the hollow structure of plasma jet in the end of paper.